Exploring new tools to add to my toolbox

Unity Mecanim Animation Notes

Unity’s learning center has a lot of information, I chose to start with the headliner tutorials. These appear to be full-day lectures during the Unite conference, where they take the class through building a game from beginning to end.

Since real games take more than a day to build, many shortcuts were taken. One of these shortcuts were the use of built art assets. All came already created, complete with their own associated animation sequences. The tutorial only covered how to import the items and write a few lines of code to trigger the animation sequences.

I have no illusions about being an artist but I also know I don’t have an artist to call upon as I learn Unity. So I had to know something about creating these assets for myself. I thought I would start small with a few simple sprite animations… that turned out to be not so simple.

The Unity animation engine (sometimes called Mecanim in the documentation) is a very complex machine optimized to work with humanoid figures in 3D space. It can certainly do simple sprite animations, but trying to do so became an exercise in figuring out what to turn offin the big complex machine. It keeps trying to do too much, blending and interpolating and trying to be helpful when all I really want was to put a few 2D images on screen at discrete coordinates at specific points in time.

It took way more time than it should, but (1) I got my simple sprite animations working, and (2) I learned a whole bunch about what the animation engine can do for me, down the line, when I’m ready to move beyond sprites.

It was a bit frustrating, but now that I’m through it, I’ll call it a win. Time to move on.